The likely re-election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi risks increasing attacks on the rights of Muslims in the country. He and his party, the BJP (Indian People’s Party), are staunch supporters ofhindutva, an ethno-nationalist political ideology that defines India’s cultural identity in terms of Hinduism. While India is officially secular, they want to make it an openly Hindu state.
The country is made up of approximately 80% Hindus, or 966 million people, and only 14% Muslims, or approximately 200 million people. However, although Muslims are a minority in the country, in absolute numbers they make India the third country with the most Muslim people in the world, after Pakistan and Indonesia.
Islamophobic hatred has become more and more open since the former governor of Gujarat came to power in 2014. The research group IndiaSpend reports that 90% of religion-related hate crimes committed in India since 2009 have been place since the election of the BJP leader. The independent organization Hate Crime Watch calculates that 74% of hate crime victims are Muslim. Legal action has also been taken against the producers of films whose protagonists are Hindu-Muslim couples.
Since Modi’s second election in 2019, won with a clear majority, the BJP has notably restricted the autonomy of the Jammu and Kashmir region, a Muslim-majority territory contested by China and Pakistan, despite special protections in the Constitution which nevertheless guarantee this autonomy.
The Modi government also passed and implemented a highly controversial Citizenship Act, a two-tier law that facilitates the naturalization of Hindu, Parsi, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Christian newcomers fleeing Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, but not that of Muslims, even though they are the majority in these countries. Deadly protests broke out following the amendment of this law by the Lok Sabha (Indian assembly) in 2019, killing dozens of people.
The Minister of the Interior, Amit Shah, one of the architects of this law and expected successor to Modi, has already called undocumented Muslim immigrants “termites”. Modi, for his part, called Muslims “infiltrators” during a rally on April 21, and reportedly suggested that if the main opposition Congress party came to power, it would confiscate the wealth of Hindus to give it back to families “who have too many children”, referring to Muslim families.
This law followed the equally controversial National Register of Citizens, through which the government aims to list undocumented people in India and then deport them. The tool has mainly been used against Muslim asylum seekers or undocumented Muslim Indians, notably in the northeastern state of Assam. The registry was not only aimed at new arrivals, since it can be very difficult for many families who have lived in India for decades to comply. They must in fact prove their presence in the country since before 1971, the year of arrival of a large number of refugees from Bangladesh, a country that is 91% Muslim. Identification papers must also not contain spelling errors, which are quite common in Assam, where the illiteracy rate is high.
Jihad of love
Since 2014, but more openly since the start of this year’s electoral process, conspiracy theories have been promoted by government representatives, such as that of love jihad (love jihad). Several BJP politicians have suggested that Muslim men want to marry Hindu women in a bid to convert them to Islam. These men are allegedly fomenting a conspiracy aimed at increasing the country’s Muslim population.
Fallacious arguments for love jihad date back at least to the 1920s and the Hindu revival movement called ” shuddhi ”, Sanskrit word for “purification”. One of the main objectives of the movement was to reconvert Hindu women who had converted to Islam by presenting them as victims of the ruse of Muslim men.
Since 2014, several states have adopted regulations to restrict intermarriage, such as Uttar Pradesh’s Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance. This law requires the publication of a public notice two months before the marriage, even if one member of the couple has converted to a single-sex marriage. If the magistrate decides that the conversion was carried out under duress, it could result in a denial of marriage and up to 10 years in prison.
Although the order applies in principle to everyone, the approximately 30 arrests made since its adoption have all targeted Muslim men. Several other Indian states have adopted similar policies or are planning to do so. The BJP-ruled province of Madhya Pradesh disguised its own under a “freedom of religion” bill.
Despite the obsession of some Hindu nationalists, unions of different religions represent only 2.2% of total marriages in India, and they require a complex administrative procedure. There are five matrimonial laws: the Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi Marriage Acts and the Special Marriage Act. Mixed couples must use the latter, which also requires 30 days before validation. During this period, anyone can oppose the union under various pretexts — one member of the couple is already married or is not of the required age (21 years for men, 18 years for women) , the relationship is incestuous or the consent of one of the parties is not informed — and inform the authorities. The last point is already serving as an excuse for anti-mixed marriage activists to take Muslim-Hindu couples to court.
Following the cooling of Indo-Canadian relations, Ottawa will have to decide whether to defend human rights and denounce this marginalization of minorities in India, but at the risk of crumbling its economic relationship with this economic superpower, which is elsewhere on the way to becoming the fourth largest economy in the world.